[ad_1]
LONDON (AP) – The British government is planning to convene a summit of social media companies to discuss what they can do to combat online misinformation about vaccines following an outbreak of measles cases.
Although plans for such a rally are still under development, Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday expressed concern over the rising incidence of measles. He said Britain had an excellent record in the fight against the disease, but that things were suddenly "in the wrong direction", with 230 new cases of measles in the first months of this year.
He said authorities should handle misleading online information about vaccinations.
"I'm afraid people are listening to this superstitious gibberish on the Internet, all this anti-vax stuff and think the MMR vaccine is a bad idea," Johnson said as he was traveling to a hospital in the US. southwest of England. "It's wrong."
Social media companies have struggled to fight false news of all kinds, from political propaganda to false warnings about vaccines such as MMR for measles, mumps and rubella.
Although anti-vaccine sentiments have existed since vaccines existed, health experts fear that anti-vaccine propaganda will spread more quickly on social media. This may cause worried parents about vaccines to refuse to vaccinate their children against various diseases, resulting in their return.
Pinterest, the leading online repository of false information on vaccines, has taken a seemingly radical step in 2017 by blocking all research on the term "vaccines." Facebook announced in March that it would no longer recommend groups and pages that broadcast hoaxes about vaccines and that it would reject ads that do so.
But anti-vax information still slips. This includes well-held notions that vaccines cause autism or that mercury preservatives and other substances that they contain can be harmful.
Some companies, such as Twitter, have no policy against misinformation, so anti-vax propaganda would not be against their rules. But to counter such materials, Twitter US and UK users those seeking information on vaccines first obtain a government information site in their respective countries. In the United Kingdom, it is the National Health Service.
Of course, for people who are already suspicious of the government about health information, that might not do much.
Experts say that in addition to fighting against misinformation, it is necessary to provide people with reliable and reliable scientific and factual information.
Measles is highly contagious and health officials claim that at least 95% of the population needs to be vaccinated to prevent outbreaks. In May, Public Health England estimated that about 87% of five-year-olds had received both doses.
According to the World Health Organization, the number of measles cases reported worldwide in the first six months of 2019 was higher than that of the year 2006, "with straining epidemics health systems and leading to illness, disability and death. " its highest number of measles cases in 25 years.
Some British health officials welcomed Johnson's proposal, but said the country's health service was already struggling to meet existing demands. Helen Bedford, a professor at the Institute of Child Health at University College London, noted that many clinics of doctors were closing down and the number of health workers in the country had dropped significantly recently.
"It's a pressurized system," she said in a statement.
Johnson presented plans to improve UK immunization rates, calling on health officials to redouble their efforts to ensure that 95% of residents receive both doses of the MMR vaccine. The Ministry of Health will present a strategy to tackle the problem this fall and should consider using technology to identify people who may have missed a vaccination and make appointments easier.
___
Barbara Ortutay, Technical Writer at AP, has contributed to this story from San Francisco.
[ad_2]
Source link